I won’t be going to see this movie. Horror movies terrify me, and not in a good way. In fact, I’m a little terrified right now, just thinking about this movie…

Here’s the trailer:

So the trailer doesn’t actually SAY that the two men repeatedly rape the zombie girl who is tied up and actively resisting them. But they do. After the jump is a synopsis excerpted from imdb (spoiler alert, ’cause I know you’re gonna run out and watch it) and more images:

…two teenagers, Rickie (Shiloh Fernandez) and JT (Noah Segan)… decide to go to an abandoned mental asylum… they see a girl chained to a table with a plastic bag over her head. Rickie wants to call the police, but JT tells him not to. They touch her and it is revealed that she is alive.

JT punches Rickie and Rickie leaves.

He comes back later with a gun, and JT tells him that he started hitting the girl to stop her screaming. He then shoots her three times, but she doesn’t die. Rickie thinks it is messed up…

He returns to the basement to free the girl and hears a banging sound, where he finds Wheeler [some other dude] having sex with her…

…Wheeler tells them that he and Rickie don’t need Joann [the girl Rickie has a crush on] because they have their own pussy now. Johnny and Dwyer go to the basement, where JT asks them if they want a go on the girl. They argue about this for a while before relenting, and have sex with her. Rickie argues with Johnny, causing the girl to bite his penis, and JT tells them that they can’t go to the police about it.

…

Later, JT tells Wheeler he knows how to make a new deadgirl, and they go in search of a woman. They find a woman on the car park of a petrol station, and JT hits her with a crowbar, but she manages to beat them both up and escapes. Joann sees them and argues with them about what happened to Johnny, so they kidnap her instead.

They take her to the basement and tie her up… apparently the new deadgirl.

Here she is before they murder her:

Lovely, wasn’t she?

The necrophilia and rape is actually joked about in one of the movie posters with the tagline “You’ll never have anything better”:

And the other poster, too, uses a sideways mouth to make sure that prospective movie goer really know what the movie is about (i.e., fucking a dead girl):

It has been called “audacious” (Hollywood Reporter), “unsettlingly sexual” (IndieWIRE) and “pretty much f***ing brilliant” (Ain’t It Cool News).

Only one of the dozen or so reviews I read, at Dread Central, suggested that it might just be a wee bit problematic:

Deadgirl should have been entitled Rape Movie for it is simply a cheap, exploitative, and misogynistic parody, rather than the controversial film it promised to deliver.

Feel free to click on over and read the reviews. If there’s anything more disturbing than the material advertising the movie itself, it’s what reviewers have to say about it.

I’m not sure what to say except:

1. It’s pretty disturbing to me that the reviewers of this movie almost unanimously think the movie is awesome and see no issue with the subject matter or plot line. That the primary critique of this movie seems to be its “pacing” or that it has “too much atmosphere” speaks to how normalized sexualized violence against women has become in our society.

2. I don’t understand why, when something is gross, horrifying, shocking, or offensive, we call it “edgy” or “original.” There is nothing original about rape and sexual objectification. Nor, apparently, is it marginalized enough to suggest that it’s on the edge. Are we really that dumb, as consumers, that we fall for this?

NEW! L. sent us a screen shot of this teaser for DeadGirl on Facebook. What caught her attention, she noted, was the description of it as one of the “hottest,” not scariest or even most controversial horror flicks.